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The word Fediverse comes from the joining of the
words “Federated” and “Universe”. It encompasses web-based social
software that is inter-operable through open protocols1 and gives each person full control over their own website and data.

(of a country or organization) set up as a single centralized unit within which each state or division keeps some internal autonomy.

Where are we now?

Modern social technology, for the most part, revolves around huge
central areas of power. Places like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Google
have become household names. But these sorts of companies are not
conducive to a free and open world.

These central powers monopolise much of the communication between
people and fully own and control the data that they collect from said
communications.

Not only do they own that data, but it is their core business models
to learn as much as possible about us and monetise that data for their actual customers – their investors2.

Not only is this dangerous to a free and open world, and along with
it freedom of speech, but it also strips people of their control over a
huge portion of what it means to be a human being on the planet Earth
today – their personal data.

Huge leaps in the right direction

The Fediverse tips the current digital social system on its head, by
enabling people to take back ownership over their digital selves. With
certain services that are available, you3
have the ability to choose alternatives to mainstream technology – you
have the ability to take back control, as these federated services have
decentralisation built into their core.

This decentralisation removes the giant centres we’re used to seeing,
leveling the playing field and giving each person an equal place from
which to speak.

Yes, you would need to set up your own installation, or have somebody
with the know-how you trust do it for you. But once you have that
freedom with your very own digital home – that you truly own and control
– it’s very liberating.

Let’s use a service called “Mastodon”
as an example here. Mastodon is often described as being a federated
Twitter, which it is, but I think it’s important to really hammer home
what that actually means. And the principles I will describe here apply
to many other types of federated social sites. For example: Peertube – a federated youtube contender; and Pixelfed – a federated Instagram clone.

It’s also worth saying that when we say something is a federated version
of a current site, that current site has zero to do with them – it is
just a way for people to grasp what the given federated site offers by
way of general features.

Mastodon, for example

Mastodon is not just a single website. It is an open source project that can power anybody’s website.

Me trying to explain mastodon in a single line.

If I have my own installation of Mastodon (each installation is known as an Instance,
by the way), then I have my very own Twitter-like website where I can
share my thoughts and images with anybody who would care to read them.
And if you had your own instance of it, you could do the same.

We would be at completely different web addresses. However, we would
still be able to communicate with one another, thanks to the way that
mastodon works. (In comparision, everyone who uses Twitter goes through https://twitter.com.
So talking to one another there takes place in Twitter’s house, as it
were). With federation, the communication is done so between the people
involved; from their own homes.

What makes the Fediverse federated, is its ability to enable people to have their own self-controlled instance of a service and still be able to connect with other people as we have come to love4 about Twitter et al. And imagine that, but with thousands and thousands of instances – all able to talk to one another.

It’s going to be a long hard road out of our current situation, but it all starts here – in the Fediverse.

And it doesn’t stop there.

Cross-service communication

A big tennet of federated services, is that there are no lock-ins to any particular one.

Earlier on I mentioned some other federated services – Peertube (for
video sharing) and Pixelfed (a federated version of Instagram). Let’s
suppose that I have a friend who has an instance of Peertube, where they
share video reviews on, let’s say the Australian soap “Neighbours”. And
let’s suppose I wanted to get updates from that friend, but I only have
my own Mastodon site. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could follow his
Peertube site, but from my Mastodon?

You already know what’s coming doing you? 😀

You can!

For example, I can follow a content creator from their own instance
of Peertube, and have their messages come through in my mastodon feed.
This is the exact opposite of how we are currently used to seeing online
services. The big social networks have lock-ins to their own walled
gardens – the Fediverse is a huge open park where people can choose to
travel through it any way they wish.

The beauty, and extra special powers, of the fediverse is that it
isn’t limited to a single service. The underlying protocols (ways that
the sites communicate) are designed in such a way that they can be used
by any service that wishes to implement them. And those messages still
go from person to person – there is no central authority to trust and /
or fear.

Joining the Fediverse

Right now, it is hard for none-tech people to get up and running with
their very own instance of a chosen service. This is the fediverse’s
biggest hurdle right now in my opinion, but it is still early days and
hopefully things will get easier with time.

That being said, there are numerous community-driven instances of
services that allow you to register on. This does go against that idea
of self-control and ownership that I have been talking about somewhat.
However, we all have to start somewhere and joining a popular community
instance is a great way to try it out and even discover new friends.
Plus, once you are comfortable in the Fediverse, there is nothing
stopping you from starting your own instance later on down the road,
should you have the technical knowledge or someone to help you do so.

I hope you, after reading this, will give the fediverse a try for
yourself. This is freedom of speech at its best on the web right now,
and I encourage you to give it a go for yourself. And if / when you do,
come and say hello: https://mastodon.davidpeach.co.uk

In Closing

The fediverse is an agreement that the people who use social services
online, indeed the entire web, should be in full control and ownership
of 100% of their data. They should be free to be who they want to be,
without being beholden to huge conglomerates whose only bar for success
is profit for renting access to peoples private data.

Set up a new server (with Digital Ocean)

If you don’t have an account already, head to Digital Ocean and create a new account. Of course, you can use any provider that you want to – I just happen to use them and so can only give experience from that.

Login to your account.

Setup your SSH key

In the next step we will be creating your new droplet (server), and you will need an SSH Key to add to it. This allows for easy and secure access to your new droplet from your local computer, via your terminal1.

If you are going to use the Digital Ocean console terminal, skip down to ‘Create the new “Droplet”‘, as you wont need an ssh key.

Creating the key (if you haven’t already)

If you haven’t generated an SSH key pair before, open a fresh terminal window and enter the following:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

Press enter through all of the defaults to complete the creation.

Getting the contents of the public key

Type this to display your new public key:

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

This will give you a long string of text starting with ssh-rsa and ending with something like yourname@your-computer.

Highlight the whole selection, including the start and end points mentioned, and right click and copy.

When you are creating your droplet below, you can select the New SSH Key button and paste your public key into the box it gives you. You will also need to give the key a name when you add it in Digital Ocean, but you can name it anything.

Then click the Add SSH Key and you’re done.

Create the new “Droplet”

Digital Ocean refers to each server as a droplet, going with the whole digital “ocean” theme.

Head to Create > Droplets and click the “One-click apps” tab. Then choose the following options in the selection (Or your own custom selection – just take into account the monthly cost of each option):

LAMP on 18.04

$15/Month (2GB / 60GB / 3TB Transfer)

Enable backups (not necessary but recommended)

London (Choose your closest / preferred location)

Add your SSH key (see above)

Optionally rename the hostname to something more readable

Once you have selected the above (or your own custom options) click create. After a few moments, your droplet will be ready to use.

Set your DNS

Got to your domain name provider, Hover in my case, and set up the subdomain for your nextcloud installation, using the I.P. address for your new droplet.

I’m assuming that you already have your own domain name, perhaps for your personal website / blog. In which case we are adding a subdomain to that (so https://nextcloud.yourdomain.co.uk, for example).

But there is nothing stopping you from buying a fresh domain and using it exclusively for your new Nextcloud (https://my-awesome-nextcloud.co.uk).

I will be continuing this guide, assuming that you are using a subdomain.

You will add it in the form of an A record. This is how I would add it in Hover:

Select your own domain

Choose edit > edit DNS

Click Add A record on the DNS edit page

Fill in the hostname as your desired subdomain for your Nextcloud. For example if you were having nextcloud.mydomain.co.uk, you would just enter nextcloud.

Fill in the I.P. address as the I.P. address of your new Droplet in Digital Ocean.

Click Add Record

Configuring the server

Install all the required programs for Nextcloud

First ssh into your new server:

ssh root@YOUR.IP.ADDRESS.HERE

When we chose to install the LAMP option when setting up the droplet, it installed Linux, Apache2, MySQL and PHP. However, there are still some extra dependencies that Nextcloud needs to run.
Let’s install those next:

A quick mysql fix

In recent versions of MySQL, the way that the mysql root user connects to the database means that password authentication wont work. So firstly we need to alter that user to use password authentication.

Let’s Encrypt will handle the registering of the apache settings for you new ssl to work. It uses the server name you entered in the 000-default.conf file earlier.

It will also create a new file that is used by Apache for the SSL. For me, this file was at /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default-le-ssl.conf.

First Login!

Now go to https://nextcloud.yourdomain.co.uk and you should see your nice new shiny Nextcloud installation.

Creating the admin account

Fill in the fields for your desired name and password for the admin account. You can just use the admin account as your main account if you will be the only one using this Nextcloud. But you can give others access to this site with their own login details, if you wanted. But without the admin-level priviledges.

For the database fields, enter root as the username. Then for the password, use the one that you set in the previous mysql command above. For the database name choose whatever name you wish, as the installation will create it for you.

Click finish.

After a few moments time, your nextcloud instance should present you with the landing screen along with the welcome popup. Go ahead and read it and you could even install the app for your devices as it will suggest.

Finishing touches

If you click the cog icon in the top right of your screen, followed by settings in its dropdown, you will come to the main settings area. In the left-hand column, beneath the heading “Administration”, you should see the link for “Overview”. Click it.

Now you should see a bunch of security and setup warnings at the top of the page. This is nothing to worry about, it is simply telling you about some actions that are highly recommended to setup.

We will do that now. 🙂

The “Strict-Transport-Security” HTTP header is not set to at least “15552000” seconds. For enhanced security, it is recommended to enable HSTS as described in the security tips.

All that is needed to fix this first one, is a quick edit to the apache config file that Let’s Encrypt created for the installation.

nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default-le-ssl.conf

And then add this following three lines within the <VirtualHost *:443> tag.

This picture is one of the most exciting pictures I’ve seen in a while. On the surface it is just three people looking at something on a computer monitor. However, for those who know and enjoy two of these people’s work, it is something to shout home about.

Junji Ito

The guy on the left is Junji Ito – horror manga legend and instrumental in bringing the genre to modern mainstream attention. I enjoy horror manga very much and Junji Ito is one of those authors whose work I actively search for. His art style is instantly recognisable and has created some of the most memorable and terror-inducing images and stories.

His most well known stories are probably Uzumaki, Tomie, and Gyo. Each masterpieces in their own right and serve to solidify Ito’s position at the very top of his game. His stories, especially those mentioned, work within the horror sub-genre of ‘Body Horror’.

Hideo Kojima

The guy on the right is Hideo Kojima. Kojima is a name well-known and highly respected within the gaming community, and indeed the wider community of action and story telling. He is the man responsible for the Metal Gear Solid series whose reputations really do precede them.

Each of the games of Kojima’s that I have played I have fallen in love with. The first two Metal Gear Solid games, the first on the Playstation and the second on the Playstation 2, were such important games to me growing up, with me being about fifteen years old and eighteen years old respectively when they were released.

These games were some of the most memorable gaming experiences that I have ever had and have definitely stayed with me to the present day.

Why this picture is exciting

To have both of these people present in the same photo, apparently reviewing something together in an office, s exciting. The had previously been working together on what was going to be a new Silent Hill game. The very thought of that even being a possibility is cause enough to lose your shit over. Junji Ito’s twisted and macabre creations within a world created and directed by Kojima…

…But it was never to be. Silent Hills, as it was called, was cancelled and they both went their separate ways. And that was that…

…Or was it?

Death Stranding is the game that Kojima and his team are currently working on, which is exciting in itself. However, when you take the recent image above and consider the very real possibility that the two masters themselves could in fact still be working together, whole new levels of awesome enter into the mix.

Every single regurgitated blog post I see about starting a blog always says the same thing – find a niche and focus on targeting it. This can be a toxic idea as it has the power to both limit you and paralyse you from writing.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a focus in your writing, just don’t let finding a focus stop you from writing.

My advice to anybody out there wanting to start a blog is this – just open a free WordPress.com account and get writing. I mention WordPress as it is cloud-based, free, and has the ability for you to export your posts when you are ready to move to a self-hosted solution.

Just start writing.

Even the process of setting up a self-hosted WordPress site can be danuting for new people, but that’s okay. You shouldn’t need to worry about these steps when you are just starting out.

I highly recommend that you do have a self-hosted website eventually, just don’t let setting one up hinder you from any writing you could actually be doing.

You don’t need to feel that you have to publish everything you write either. Just writing for writing’s sake is good for you. Obviously if you can share your thoughts and experiences with the world then that’s all good, just don’t feel you have to.

Twin Peaks has always been a show of, amongst many other things, great music. Not only is its soundtrack one of the most instantly recognisable from any show, but Julie Cruise’s performances too were unforgettable. It’s been great to see that the music in Twin Peaks The Return has pushed the music even more front and centre.

Nearly every episode has featured pretty much a full performance from bands playing in The Roadhouse. And every one has been stunning – not least of all was last night’s performance by none of that Rebecca Del Rio. Fans of David Lynch may remember Rebecca from his film Mulholland Drive and her French performance of Roy Orbsion’s “crying”. 17 years on, and her voice is just as, if not more, powerful than ever.

Lynch really does have a gift for picking out unique and interesting bands for these shows. Another band I have got back into thanks to Twin Peaks is a dreampop group called “The Chromatics”. The music that these three make is made for the world of Twin Peaks.

The biggest band to have been featured thus far, as of part 10 at least, is Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor and band absolutely kill it and setup the show’s most bizarre and intense sequence to date perfectly.

Yesterday morning I was witness to a bit of casual racism which really got me annoyed and ready to rage at the dickhead who uttered it. There were no bad words used but, nonetheless, his confused intent got to me.

The Setup

The train was pulling into the station as I was waiting to board it with my fellow commuters. I have come to recognise a few of the people who are regulars on my train. One of which is a young lady I tend to notice, as she also gets off at the same station as me at the other end.

As we were boarding, another lady squeezed herself and her travel bag between the first lady and the train in order to get on quicker. The affected lady didn’t seem bothered as she wasn’t barged or anything.

However, a man stood just behind me decided to pipe up and make his thoughts heard.

The utterings of the opportunist racist

Man to lady : “I think she wants to get on there.”

The lady smiled politely.

Man to lady : “She must be important as she’s got her bags.”

Again, the lady acknowledged him but didn’t reply.

Man to lady : “You can tell she’s not British”.

You can tell she’s not British. Like… What the fuck? The lady who squeezed ahead didn’t say a word and to be honest, didn’t seem phased at all by his comments. And while I don’t condone squeezing past people in order to get their seat on a train, I condone even less any excuse for racism.

Firstly there was nothing about the woman to indicate she wasn’t British (whether she actually was or not is completely irrelevant). Secondly, I don’t even know if this idiot knew what he meant by the term “British”. I can guess what he thinks it means though.

In Closing

It really annoys me when people who could otherwise be smart, have this unfounded ideas of “us and them”. The seeds of which are usually planted by the mainstream media or in people’s filter bubbles in Facebook, twitter et al.

We as a people can solve so many complex ideas and theories, we can put people on the moon, but we can’t all get along in an open and friendly manner.

I have just written this post and then lost it without saving. I am annoyed. That said, I’ll try and rewrite without rushing too much.

I’m always tinkering around with this website. As a result I tend to sometimes get bored with it. I feel the design just looks dull and uninspired, and find that my backend could be a lot cleaner… phrasing. I then feel that my website needs to be improved – and as a result rebuilt.

This is the inner critic talking.

You know that guy/gal right? They are the one that sits back doing naff-all and only pipes up to say something when you’ve created something, or are thinking of doing so, and says “That’s shit – what are you thinking?”. The inner critic is a fecking wonker (intentional fake swearing) and needs to be put down.

Something I listened to last week really hit home with me about this. On this episode of The Web Ahead podcast, Jen Simmons talked with Jeremy Keith about understanding the web. I am always inspired when hearing Jeremy talk about the web and building for it

This is when the site never gets launched because it’s never quite good enough. The number of designers who haven’t launched because it doesn’t look quite right, or the number of developers because they haven’t finished writing their own CMS.

In this episode He and Jen were talking about how people – in general – are so used to publishing on the web through a service – or gatekeeper as they called it. Also they mentioned about people’s habit of self-censoring and imposing their own restrictions.

It was after listening to this that I realised that my own reasons for thinking I needed to rebuild my site were all self-imposed reasons and that it was stopping me from actually writing stuff. I have been concentrating too much on the tools of publishing instead of actually just publishing.

So this entry is a way for me to try and break that habit. Let’s see how long I can keep it up for… phrasing.

Facebook, Twitter, Google plus – all places that help you to publish easily – and for free – on the web.

But guess what, the web is already free – or at least it should be – and many people’s only notion of publishing on the web is through one of these, or other, third party silos. It doesn’t have to be this way.

And it shouldn’t be this way.

Where are we now?

In the beginning there was the web. This completely revolutionised publishing and gave everyone a chance to have their voice heard. 25 years on and that is still the case. Only now we have these monolithic silos that have made publishing even easier, and for free (zero cost).

The problem with free though, is that it comes at a price. All of these companies that offer you the opportunity to publish and get your thoughts out there, are doing so to serve their real customers – their partners and investors. You see, every piece of information you pass into these silos, whether knowingly or not, is used to help profile you and your friends. This profiling and tracking goes on to help make you more susceptible to targetted advertising – the core business model of most modern-day tech “startups”.

Imagine a world where everyone’s thoughts and opinions are only published through one of the current “Ministries of Truth”, where the publisher only shows what it wants to show; hiding what it wants to hide as it “currates your timeline”.

We desperately need many more independent avenues of information and points of view from people, not corporations, if we are ever going to get a chance at a more free on open world online.

The Indieweb

The Indieweb is an initiative; a community, with the aim of publishing on ones own website and taking back control over the content that they publish.

Everyone who has access to the web has the potential – and it’s not as hard as it may seem – to get started publishing with you in control. The Indieweb isn’t about jumping through hoops to publish in a particular way either – the whole point is to do it your way and under your terms.

You should be able to publish and present your content in exactly the way that you want to. This post is about introducing you to the concept of the Indieweb – to the concept of your being in control of your own writing and publishing.

To get started on your path to online writing freedom, head over to the Indieweb site now for advice.

I’ve been in training for a half-marathon on the 18th October and two weeks ago I injured my knee. Well, I say injured, it started aching badly the day after and so I had to take a week off. After said week, I went out again and half way through that run it started to twinge again. So I walked back. Another week or so has passed and I have been on a six-mile run earlier this evening. So far no pains and really hope not to have any tomorrow. If I have to walk this half-marathon I’m going to do it. My aim is to do the 13.1 miles in two hours or less.

In my experience, learning is like throwing mud up a wall. On the first throw some will stick and some will fall off. Then on the second throw more will stick and so on and so on.

Whatever it is you want to learn or create, there really is no substitute for lots of hard work and practice. When first starting out you may cringe at what you have produced or may even find yourself comparing your work to that of much more experienced people, convinced that you’ll never be as good as them.

Nevertheless continue.

Keep on down your chosen path and if you feel the end is getting no closer to you, then you’ll have learnt a very important lesson in learning itself – the end of the path should never be reached.

If you get to a point where you truly believe that you have learned everything that you need to know, you’ll stop trying and, ultimately, stop caring.

Never let this happen.

You should keep throwing mud up the wall, metaphorically speaking, and when you think the wall is well and truly covered, move round to the opposite side and continue.

Just keep learning, keep getting excited about what it is you do, and keep working hard.

The people you admire and compare yourself against will have, and probably still are, going through similar thought processes to your own. They themselves will have their own heroes whose admiration they’ll seek and to whom they will compare themselves.

And who knows, keep working hard and you may just have people looking to you for inspiration in the near future.